What do you get when you combine Jesus, Nazis and Bakelite? A forged Vermeer painting.
At a talk last night at the MFA, Jonathan Lopez, author of The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren, made the case that forging art is more a manipulation of expectations then a mechanical act of reproduction.
Forger Han van Meegeren passed off a series of his own paintings as priceless 17th century Vermeers in the first half of the twentieth century, even selling one to Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe. Confessing his crimes after being arrested for collusion in 1945, van Meegeren became a folk hero, the guy who tricked both the Nazis and the eggheads.
So how did he do it? First, he took advantage of nationalist pride. In the way that a Winslow Homer painting just seems kind of “American” to us, Van Meer’s paintings were in a style that seemed “Dutch” and appealed directly to a sense of Aryan pride. This, despite the fact that many of the images were of Jesus, who was not, in fact, Dutch.
Second, he used a newly invented product, Bakelite, to sidestep the methods normally used to detect fakes. Curators weren’t trained to look for this new “wonder material” so it slipped through the system, despite essentially being a form of colored superglue.
Third, he used contemporary expectations of how viewers thought good paintings should look. Like American Apparel shoppers, we tend to see a timeless quality in what is actually a fad. A fake painting has a lifespan of about one generation, as newer eyes come to see the clichés in a style that used to look pure.
Ultimately van Meegeren’s audacity was what let people trust him. Like Mike in Mamet’s House of Games, he knew the trick: “It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.”
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